Diversity and accessibility of smoking cessation aids in the Internet

Aim of the Study: Only a few smokers use smoking cessation aids. The Internet can act as a medium to improve the dissemination of traditional smoking cessation aids, but can also provide direct help by its own interactive capabilities. The purpose of this study is to give an overview of the different smoking cessation aids offered via the Internet and to categorise their contents. Methods: Two different search strategies were used to find smoking cessation aids on the Internet. The first was a search with the search engine Google. Six search terms were previously generated by interviews with one hundred smokers. Using these terms, the Google search resulted in a list of 106 websites. The second strategy was a direct search on 31 websites of different health-related institutions. To classify the smoking cessation aids on the websites, a system of different categories was developed. Results: The offers for smoking cessation on the Internet could be assigned to 11 categories. General information about smoking cessation was the most and Interactive programs was the least represented category. The websites of the health-related institutions offered a larger variety of directly useable smoking cessation aids (39%) than the websites retrieved via Google (29%). Conclusion: Interactive smoking cessation aids which provide individual support are still under-represented on the Internet. Direct search strategies on the pages of health-related institutions were more promising than the use of a search engine. The proactive promotion of quality-controlled Internet offers seems to be important to capitalise on the potential of the Internet.